Skip to main content
Live Webinar with SANS (June 25)— Agentic CTI Automation for Fun & ProfitRegister Free
Mallory
High

Panic in Go net Dial and LookupPort on Windows with NUL-byte input

IdentifiersCVE-2026-39836CWE-248

CVE-2026-39836 affects Go's net package on Windows. The Dial and LookupPort functions would panic when provided input containing a NUL (0) byte instead of handling the condition safely. The issue is specific to Windows input handling in these APIs. The fix changes the affected functions to return an error rather than panicking when NUL-byte input is supplied.

Share:
For your environment

Are you exposed to this one?

Mallory correlates every CVE against your assets, your vendors, and active adversary campaigns. Know which vulnerabilities matter for you, not just which ones are loud.

ANALYST BRIEF

Impact, mitigation & remediation

What it means. What to do now. Patch path, mitigations, and the assume-compromise checklist.

Impact

What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.

A local or remote attacker able to supply crafted input containing a NUL byte to application code that invokes net.Dial or net.LookupPort on Windows can trigger a panic in the Go process. The practical impact is denial of service through application crash or abrupt termination of the affected operation, depending on how the application handles panics.

Mitigation

If you can’t patch tonight, do this now.

If immediate upgrade is not possible, validate and reject untrusted inputs containing NUL (0) bytes before passing them to net.Dial or net.LookupPort on Windows. Where feasible, add defensive input sanitization and panic recovery around code paths that process attacker-controlled network address or service-name inputs. These are interim mitigations and do not replace upgrading.

Remediation

Patch, then assume compromise.

Upgrade to a fixed Go release that includes the CVE-2026-39836 patch, specifically Go 1.26.3 or Go 1.25.10 as referenced in the provided content. In fixed versions, Dial and LookupPort return an error for NUL-byte input instead of panicking.
PUBLIC EXPLOITS

Exploits

No public exploits tracked yet. Mallory keeps watching.

VALID 0 / 0 TOTALView more in app

No public exploit code observed for this vulnerability.

EXPOSURE SURFACE

Affected products & vendors

Products and vendors Mallory has correlated with this vulnerability. Open in Mallory to drill down to specific CPE configurations and version ranges.

VendorProductType
GolangGoapplication

Vendor-confirmed product mapping. Mallory continuously reconciles this list against your asset inventory.

What this page doesn’t show

The version that knows your environment.

This page is what’s public. Mallory adds the parts that aren’t: which of your assets are affected, which adversaries are exploiting it right now, which detections to deploy, and what to do tonight.
Exposure mapping

Query your assets running an affected version, and investigate the blast radius.

Threat actor evidence

Every observed campaign linking this CVE to a named adversary.

Associated malware

Malware families riding this exploit, with evidence and IOCs.

Detection signatures

YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.

Vendor-by-vendor mapping

Cross-references every affected SKU, including bundled OEM variants.

Social activity6

Community discussion across Reddit, Mastodon, and other social sources.